urheimat
Sign in to saveAlso known as endemic to (language), language is endemic to, linguistic homeland, homeland (linguistics)
region in which a proto-language was spoken
Wikidata facts
- Subclass of
- homeland
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- facet of
- historical linguistics
- characteristic of
- language family
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Encyclopedic overview
In historical linguistics, the homeland or Urheimat ( German: [ˈʔuːɐ̯ˌhaɪ̯maːt]; lit. 'Original home') of a proto-language is the region in which it was spoken before splitting into different daughter languages. A proto-language is the reconstructed or historically attested parent language of a group of languages that are genetically related.
Depending on the age of the language family under consideration, its homeland may be known with near-certainty (in the case of historical or near-historical migrations) or it may be very uncertain (in the case of deep prehistory). Next to internal linguistic evidence, the reconstruction of a prehistoric homeland makes use of a variety of disciplines, including archaeology and archaeogenetics.
Excerpted from Wikipedia’s “urheimat” article, available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 licence.